Gnarly Error Messages

Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."

Comments

Sun Blade 150 after installing Debian:

[Sivar]

Error: I have no root and I must scream.

(Couldn't find the hard drive)

Gotta light?, make love, and bad magic number

[Charles Dodgeson]

On older versious of csh, the error message to

gotta light?

was pretty good. (It was "No match").

Also earlier Unix make, (not GNU make) had a nice error response to make love. ("don't know how to make love. Stop.")

One of my favorites, as a complete newbie in 1979, was probagly the consequence of typing ld in place of ls in some long forg The result was "bad magic number". That truly had me baffled.